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Jan. 10, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
15:08
Discourse Pollution

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comCharles Johnson joins Richard to discuss the legacy of January 6, populism, and “discourse pollution.”

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So, yeah, I mean, there is a certain sense in which, like, Bannon wanted to be the Rasputin, but didn't, like, really have the chops.
Like, I remember in July of 2016, he wanted to be introduced to Trump.
He didn't know Trump, right?
And there was a sort of like pact that was made with Kellyanne Conway.
She who was, you know, the daughter of actual Italian mobsters in Philadelphia.
And she, she who was a pollster.
And kind of a flim flam woman in her own right.
And she was basically propped up by Rebecca Mercer.
And there was a sort of deal cut that Bannon would come in and be the campaign manager after Paul Manafort went down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It more or less came to pass, obviously, where Trump won.
But Bannon was always trying to LARP himself and make himself into this world-historic figure.
And candidly, he wasn't really all that involved in the transition.
He basically used it as an opportunity to grift, to meet all these wealthy and famous people.
And he put himself on the cover of Time magazine.
He tried to basically make himself into this figure, which...
He really had no claim.
He had no books.
He has no real political thought.
And of course, he's also just terribly stupid because if you wanted to deconstruct the administrative state, you wouldn't say that right off the bat because you would basically call down ordinance on your position because every bureaucrat in the administrative state is going to just hunt you for sport now because you're literally messing with their very existence.
I think, look, I think a lot of this comes out of the Claremont School, the sort of like, you know, the sort of like RJ Pastrito School that basically argues that progressivism was bad because it essentially was anti-mob, right?
That it was trying to like actually reform and make government institutions work, and that we should have just let the Constitution be captured by organized crime.
I think that that's really what people want to go back to.
There are lots of us who like the EPA, that like the FDA, that like a lot of these government institutions.
And to the extent that they don't work well, want them to work better, right?
And want to figure out ways to fix them.
But Bannon had no real solutions other than rip up the Iran deal and deconstruct the administrative state and get everyone fired up and going crazy.
And that was sort of his...
That was sort of his raison d 'etre.
And if you look at his connections, I mean, you know, the War for Eternity book mentions all the weird occult stuff he's into.
It mentions all the weird stuff he was into in Hong Kong.
He was, of course, removed from the Navy.
It's unclear if he was court-martialed or what happened there.
There's sort of like a counterintelligence investigation going on against Bannon.
I myself was called by the FBI to see if Bannon was leaking material to me and to others.
And I said he may have been leaking it to Cernovich, but he sure as hell wasn't leaking it to me because, you know, he and I sort of had a falling out right after Trump got elected.
He claimed, you know, all kinds of crazy things during the election, which, of course, he wasn't really doing.
So, you know, it's basically basic bitch con man behavior on the part of...
Of Bannon.
And, you know, you look at his family connections, there's a lot of, like, weird ties to, there's a lot of weird ties to sort of the Irish mob in Virginia.
That's sort of where his family comes out of.
And, yes, so he's basically a con man.
And, you know, there can only be one con man in the Oval Office at any given time.
And he wasn't, he was never going to really defeat or remove, you know, remove Trump.
And I think it's interesting, To think that Bannon was an investor in Seinfeld, you know, a show about nothing, right?
Because that's very revealing of like his politics.
There's really nothing there other than just like anger and all that sort of thing.
Now, I'm told that he may be extradited to Brazil over like...
Plotting a coup in Brazil through his war room.
That's sort of like what a lot of my friends here tell me.
I can't get a hold of the ex-ambassador under Bolsonaro's government, the guy Nestor Forster.
He and I were quite friendly.
He was sort of very devout Catholic.
So I'm still trying to figure out what exactly was going on in Brazil, and it's hard to make real sense of it.
You do have to wonder, what is Matt Tierman doing down in Brazil?
What is Jason Miller doing in Brazil?
And there's a certain sense in which this global criminal syndicate is very destructive to the world order.
And we need to just remove it.
And it's unclear how to do that in a way that respects civil liberties.
But I suspect what will happen is...
It will be done, whether it's done in an elegant way or a violent way.
They will be removed from the discourse.
I hope so, because all they do is pollute discourse.
And, you know, as we mentioned the other week, I mean, the J6 committee, lots of interesting stuff going on there.
But ultimately, it was this, you know, Trump is uniquely bad.
And look at all these innocent Republicans who were...
You know, corrupted by Trump.
And it's like, that's not what happened.
You know?
And Liz Cheney is doing that for obviously self-serving reasons.
And yeah, I agree.
It's like the state, it doesn't have the capacity to defend itself.
I mean, there's this line that's usually attributed to Karl Popper.
It's actually, you can even look at it with Schmidt, but...
It's the paradox of tolerance where you want to create a tolerant society.
And let's just put, instead of using the loaded word tolerant, let's just say functional, organized, safe society.
But that means that you actually have to be intolerant.
You have to make yourself the exception to do that.
And I do feel like the government...
It's almost like not capable or not ruthless enough to do it.
You don't have a right to spread Russian propaganda on Twitter.
I'm sorry.
There's no right that you are guaranteed to do that under the First Amendment.
And yes, this can get out of hand.
It could be heavy-handed.
I get it.
The state needs to defend itself at some point against these people who are inherently bad actors.
They don't just disagree with you.
They want to inspire crazy nonsense that serves their masters in some weird way.
And that's not cool.
If you invite someone to a party and they bring a bottle of whiskey and pass it around, hey, cool.
You contributed to the party.
If they come in and they bring poison gas to your party, it's like, fuck off.
You're not going to release toxic fumes in my house.
You don't have the right to do that.
You're not contributing anything.
And I've just gotten...
Again, I probably wouldn't emphasize these kinds of things four or five years ago.
At this point in my life, I'm just like, the state has a right to defend itself against these people.
No, and in many respects, if it doesn't defend itself, it's in real trouble.
Because there are lots of people who will see it as weak and not want to protect it, right?
Just out of simple self-preservation, right?
It sort of has an obligation to go after these people with the full force of law.
And even if it's heavy-handed, even if it's cruel, which I think some of the January 6th detainees have suffered pretty abhorrent conditions.
No doubt about it.
But that may well be necessary, you know, like, I mean, it's just, this is the nature of like, this is a serious game, right?
We're not going to see the United States of America descend into just mob rule and, you know, sort of like Caudillo-style Latin American dictatorship.
That's just not going to be permitted here.
I think it will basically lead to the total change of the Republican Party.
Because the Republican Party doesn't really want to contend with a lot of this issue.
I mean, you look at Liz Cheney as a sort of paramount, you know, kind of thing here, where she's celebrated, everybody loves her, right?
But of course, nobody talks about, like, her father is the one who, like, got us into Iraq, who, of course, like, got all these single-source contracts for Halliburton, right?
Who...
Of course, Halliburton stock was later purchased by the Chinese to kind of keep us forever trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And there's a certain sense here where we have to pretend that Liz Cheney is a good actor here.
And again, you see, Matt Gaetz went by himself to Wyoming to give an anti-Liz Cheney speech far before it was popular.
And his argument against Liz Cheney...
Was on all these endless war grounds that basically we were engaged in dumb geopolitical fights.
And to the extent that Gates and I, by the way, have a huge difference of opinion, I actually think the Ukraine war is in some sense necessary and actually a sort of important departure from these endless wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
And that actually it's- A sign of how serious America is becoming that we're actually taking NATO and we're taking the European Union and we're taking the Russian invasion seriously.
Obviously, totally.
We've come to a lot of similar conclusions from different perspectives.
It's interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting.
I do see some of the stuff that you've said over the bit, but I basically have spent a lot of the last few years just reading and thinking and not talking.
And I think that, you know, the thing about the January 6th thing that was most disturbing to me was that I knew a number of people who were both in the crowd and also who, like, broke into the buildings.
And, of course, didn't end up getting in any real trouble because many of them were just sort of boomers that were swept up in it.
But I always, I never thought of, you know, basically...
I never thought that that kind of thing could happen to people that I knew, right?
That I was one degree removed from.
I mean, I've had conversations with Baked Alaska.
He actually stayed in my home one Christmas Eve, I think like six or seven years ago, because he had nowhere else to go for the holidays.
So I let him come crash with me.
Well, that makes two of us.
Oh, did you take him in too?
Of course, yes.
Back in the 2017 era, yes.
Yes.
I mean, he was sort of helpless and not really a man, not really a child.
It was a very strange kind of thing.
And his parents had adopted all these people from Russia.
It was just very strange, his whole situation.
And of course, those are the kind of people that always get taken advantage of, that always get Kind of like turned into like jokes or into like, you know, they're, what is it, the patsies or the village idiot or the useless idiot or useful idiot or whatever the term is.
You know, and of course, like how naive am I not to think that that would happen, you know?
Let's do this.
We have a fairly big crowd here, 35. Do you guys want to jump in and ask some questions or bring up a topic?
Yes, Richard, you brought up free speech and stuff.
I know you watched the majority report with Sam Cedar, because they had a few days ago, or if it was last week, they interviewed some professor or something, and they talked about the Spionage Act in World War I. Now that limited speech.
The Sedition Act?
I didn't see that one.
Yeah, they talked about the Sedition Act and they talked about the Spionage Act.
I need to go watch that.
Do you want me to go?
I'll just reproduce this real quick.
So we've had multiple Sedition Acts in US history, including immediately after.
The founding of the Constitution.
But there was a Sedition Act before World War I. And that line that everyone knows, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire, was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in affirmation of the Sedition Act.
A year later, two years later, I can't remember, in another case...
Yes, they bring that up in that...
Where they talk about how he changed his mind during...
Right, and so that's remarkable.
He is an intellectual who can change his mind, and I admire him for that.
But I don't admire the logic.
I mean, it is this libertarian logic of...
The state doesn't have a right to defend itself because in America, we're this experiment.
And who knows?
Maybe anarcho-Bolshevism is the right way forward.
Who can say?
We've got to test it in the laboratory of ideas.
Just this really horrible notion, to be honest, that unilaterally disarms you to foreign actors who were being prosecuted by this act.
These are They happen to be Jewish, but they're pro-Bolshevik actors who were pamphleteering against the United States.
Encouraging people not to do their duty and register for the draft, right?
Right.
Which is, of course, I think another aspect of this, too, that is often not always acknowledged.
I mean, that's actually quite an interesting thing you brought up, because Americans don't have positive...
Their constitution don't really have...
It doesn't say anything about the duties to the state, which ironically is like a Soviet invention.
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